Volgarr the Viking

If you want a beautifull, unforgiving and hard to beat platformer play this. Precise platforming, vicious combat, challenging fights and bosses. People giving one star reviews, I pressume, didn't ge past the first level. Which is fine, there are games for everyone. This one did it for me PS: excellent sound design and music

you cannot quit the game unless you beat the boss of a level, otherwise, you lose all your progress. Checkpoint are really far & few. And not saved. thus. Well, i enjoy playing old arcade game with emulators, because i can save the machine state. There, i can't. Bad. thus, you like to lose a lot of time : 4/5 you don't have that much time : 2/5. your time will be better spent in rogue legacy

TLDR: Challenge is fun and interesting while learning a level, but replaying a level you have already mastered over and over just to get back to a boss fight to learn the boss's pattern is not fun or interesting. It's boring. Not worth the money : / Nostalgia is all well and good. So is a challenge. But the fact of the matter is, Volgarr basically asks you to play each level 20-30 times in order to master it. That gets repetitive and boring pretty quickly. Especially when the only thing you have left to master in a level is the boss. Each time you die while learning the boss's pattern (which will likely be 4-5 times per boss after the first, who is uncharacteristically easy) you will have to play the entire second half of the level over again, which by this point you know by heart. Boring. You don't even really get much in the way of bragging rights, because this game isn't that well known, so most people will not appreciate how incredible it is that you've beaten it. I get wanting to bring back the "glory days" of video games, but if you're going to do that, don't pick game mechanics designed to ratchet quarters out of twelve-year-olds as your focus. Pick something genuinely interesting.

Do to the review word limit here I guess I should keep this short and to the point so if I had to sum this game up in a short sentence it would be "this is how you do a modern retro style game" the graphics are beautiful and actually look like a genesis/megadrive or SNES game, the gameplay feels like a mix of Rastan/Rastan Saga, Legendary Axe, Castlevania and Ghouls and Ghosts with it's tight controls, lack of mid jump control(ala Castlevania 1-3 and Rastan) and it's as difficult as all those games are but no unfairly so, if you die it's your own damn fault but keep in mind when you die you go back to the very beginning of the stage each time much like many of the classic games it draws inspiration from and there is no save feature but you can skip ahead to previously unlocked stages by going left at the title screen but this will award you with the worst ending, oh right there are multiple endings based on performance and to get the best ending you need to beat all of the hidden(you access them by not dying or taking a hit) even harder/Valkyrie stages which I have yet to see done. So if you love brutal NES/SNES/Megadrive/Amiga/C64 hard side scrolling action platformers then you will love this game, if your easily frustrated you may want to give it a pass.

A Rastan clone without most of the charm of the original. the controls at times feel clumsy the level design in places is bad making it more luck than skill to get past certain points top that off with constantly having to restart from the very start makes the game frustrating.